Bread is a winner for me

My wife has lodged a very serious charge against me with the food police: She complains that I’ve monopolized our free-standing freezer with loaves of bread. It is true that I love all kinds of good baked goods and have gone to some lengths to find them, but I see nothing wrong with this. At the moment, the bottom of our garage freezer is overflowing with wonderful, dense corn rye from the Crown Supermarket in my hometown, West Hartford, Conn; a loaf of super-chewy New York rye from Zaro’s Bakery at Penn Station; the remains of a loaf of my favorite sourdough in the world from Boudin Bakery in San Francisco; two loaves of the best sourdough in the D.C. area from Brio Tuscan Grille; flavorful and dense challahs from Pariser’s Bakery in Baltimore and Great Harvest Bread Co. in Rockville, Md., and some tasty Schmidt Baking Co. potato bread buns for hot dogs.

Too much? I don’t think so. Really good bread is not always easy to find and when you do come across the perfect, dense, chewy loaf of rye on a trip, you have to grab it take it home and freeze it. Bread lasts, seemingly, for decades in the freezer if you wrap it with aluminum foil and put it in a plastic bag. And that’s exactly what I do.

So with my fondness for the staff of life, you can imagine how I reacted when I heard about a new study in an ACS journal about the wonders of Vitamin D bread. First, I thought, is there any more room in that basket? Then I started to read…

With most people unable to get enough vitamin D from sunlight or foods, scientists are suggesting that a new vitamin D-fortified food — bread made with high-vitamin D yeast — could fill that gap. Their study, confirming that the approach works in laboratory tests, appears in ACS’ Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.

Connie Weaver and colleagues cite studies suggesting that up to 7 in 10 people in the United States may not get enough vitamin D, which enables the body to absorb calcium. Far from just contributing to healthy bones, however, vitamin D seems to have body-wide beneficial effects. Vitamin D insufficiency has been linked to an increased risk of heart disease, cancer, allergy in children, and other conditions.

With few good natural sources of vitamin D, milk producers long have added it to milk. Weaver explains, however, that dairy products do not provide enough. The body makes its own vitamin D when the skin is exposed to sunlight. But people are not exposed to sun in winter and are avoiding the sun and using sun blocks in summer. Scientists thus have been looking for new ways to add vitamin D to the diet. For more, go to bread.

Image courtesy of iStock.